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Here are photos of Franklin Computer’s unreleased Apple II compatible computer dubbed the CX (code named “Kite”.) Not exactly a lightweight machine at about 25 pounds, the official term for it was “luggable” rather than portable.

Franklin went into bankruptcy before it shipped, but about 20 or so were built from available parts and given to some of the last people out the door, of which I was one.

I donated this machine to someone’s collection so I don’t have it any more.

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Just a quick update on the state of the next version of “Remember?”. I’ve got several significant new features in the works:

• Extending the cut-off year for events from 2018 to 2134
• Safer occasion file updates
• Automatic occasion file backups

The coding for these changes is essential completed but will require extensive testing before I’ll let it at anyone else’s data. Occasion files that contain events beyond 2018 won’t be compatible with previous versions of Remember? and can’t be opened by them.

These are fairly extensive changes so I’m not sure when this version will be ready for public consumption. I’ll post a pre-release test version for the more adventurous after more testing.

Many of my projects must support previous Mac OS X versions including at least 10.3, and in order to do that I have to make sure the PowerPC version is built with GCC version 3.3 rather than 4.x or the app fails to load on 10.3 and earlier. So to handle that I add an Xcode project setting named GCC_VERSION_ppc with value of 3.3 to force the PPC version to build with GCC 3.3 and everyone’s happy.

Ran into a strange problem lately where breakpoints would not work on my G5 tower but worked just fine on my Intel laptop. Same version of Xcode, same everything else I could see. EXCEPT I finally realized that the problem was that special GCC compiler setting. Apparently Xcode 3 can’t debug code compiled with GCC 3.3.

The solution is easy: instead of adding the GCC_VERSION_ppc setting to All Configurations, add it just to the Release configuration. That way Debug builds can still use breakpoints but the final will still run on Mac OS X 10.3.

The downside is you are no longer debugging with the same version of the compiler as the release uses but since bugs are never caused by the compiler that shouldn’t be an issue, right? (NOTE: This is what’s sometimes called sarcasm.)

Took a bit longer than I expected but the Remember? page now contains version 4.3 of my venerable reminder package. Not as substantial as I was hoping for but it does include some bug fixes and a couple more preferences, because there’s no such thing as too many preferences (apparently.) Both this and the previous 4.2 versions have no known issues with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

As usual the update is free if you’ve paid for any previous version.

If I remember correctly, which is never a particularly good bet, version 1.0 of Remember? might have been released some time during 1988 which means it will probably officially hit 20 years old some time next year. I’ll have to check the archives to be sure.

Kind of amazing when I stop to think about it.

I’ve just posted a minor update to hotTunes that fixes the incorrect display of its info window on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Only other change is a fix for the occasional instance where skipping to the next track would not display the new track’s rating info if the info window was already displaying something else.